As vehicles, such as rail vehicles, traverse a route, it may be desirable to know the position of a vehicle, for example, for scheduling or dispatching purposes, or to help prevent the use of the same portion of the route by two or more vehicles at the same time (e.g., to avoid collisions). Conventional approaches, for example, that may use a geographic positioning system (GPS), may not provide sufficient accuracy to discriminate between two or more adjacent tracks. To determine which of parallel or near parallel tracks on which a vehicle is traveling, additional inputs may be required, for example a position of a switch when the vehicle passes over the switch. However, conventional approaches for communicating the position of a switch to the vehicle or identifying the position of a switch require expensive trackside equipment to monitor the switch position and to communicate the switch position to the rail vehicle.